MSF to leave Somalia after 'extreme attacks'

The aid agency Medecins Sans Frontieres is to leave Somalia permanently
because authorities - including the country's government - have failed to
stop armed groups' repeated "extreme attacks" on the
organisation's staff.

Somali women and children wait to get medicine at a Medicines Sans Frontieres, MSF, run medical clinic.Photo: MOKHTAR MOHAMED/AFP

MSF was one of the few charities that remained on the ground during the 20-year civil war and has operated in the country continuously since 1991, including in areas controlled by al-Qaeda's allies, al-Shabaab.

But despite a new government and signs of increasing stability much trumpeted bySomalia's international donors, MSF said on Wednesday that it could no longer carry on in the country.

"In choosing to kill, attack, and abduct humanitarian aid workers, armed groups, and the civilian authorities who tolerate their actions, have sealed the fate of countless lives in Somalia," said Unni Karunakara, MSF's international president.

He said he included "all authorities" including Somalia's government in his assessment. Britain spends £80 million a year on aid programmes in Somalia.

"The situation has created an untenable imbalance between the risks and compromises our staff must make, and our ability to provide assistance to the Somali people," Mr Karunakara said.

Two Spanish MSF medical logistics staff who had been held hostage in Somalia for close to two years were released last month.

Two other expatriate aid workers were shot dead in Mogadishu in December 2011, adding to the 14 other MSF staff killed in the country since 1991 - a rate of one every 17 months.

"The kidnapping was the last straw but I want to be very clear that it was only the latest in a series of incidents over the 22 years that we have been present in Somalia," Mr Karunakara told The Telegraph.

State authorities and civilian leaders ruling areas outside of government control no longer recognised the "value of impartial humanitarian assistance," MSF said.

"This will be a huge blow," said Andrews Atta-Asamoah, Horn of Africa researcher at the Institute for Security Studies in Pretoria, South Africa.

"These aid agencies, unlike the United Nations, are not aligned to the government, so they can help people in places where others can't.

"There is a larger implication, too. The talk of authorities tolerating armed groups seems to me to match the perception growing in Mogadishu that certain political leaders have lost their appetite for the fight against al-Shabaab. The momentum that was there has really slowed down."

MSF had 1,500 staff working in Somalia, who last year gave close to 625,000 medical consultations, helped deliver 7,300 babies and helped treat 41,100 people in hospital.